Lauded, but Not Resting on His Laurels

Conrad Tao’s Unplay Festival Doubles as a Party

Conrad Tao at the Unplay Festival at the Powerhouse Arena in Dumbo, Brooklyn. The event, organized by Mr. Tao, crosses boundaries.Credit
Ruby Washington/The New York Times

During the first 19 years of his life the pianist, violinist and composer Conrad Tao has achieved more than many artists do in twice as many years. Still a student in a Columbia University-Juilliard School joint-degree program, Mr. Tao has earned an Avery Fisher Career Grant, a Gilmore Young Artist Award and eight consecutive Ascap Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, to name only a few of his accolades.

Tuesday was Mr. Tao’s 19th birthday, and he gave a party to celebrate. But in keeping with Mr. Tao’s prodigious ambition and rapid career ascent, Tuesday also saw the arrival of his new EMI Classics CD, “Voyages,” and his fledgling new-music series, the Unplay Festival, which he opened with a concert at the Powerhouse Arena, a bookstore and arts space in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

At a glance, the three-concert series impresses with its clever organization. Tuesday’s program, “ePhemera,” was inspired by the fleeting, unpredictable qualities of the Internet’s digital frontier. The Wednesday program, “REPlay,” proposed a 21st-century canon extending from Ravel to Bang on a Can; Thursday’s concert, “Hi/r/stories,” will encompass performance art and social activism.

Observers of the contemporary-classical world frequently cite eroding boundaries between disparate art-music and popular styles. Tuesday’s program, which started around 30 minutes late due to technical concerns, took musical melding as a starting point and then embraced other art forms. When Mr. Tao opened with “iridescence,” a bubbly piece for piano and iPad included on “Voyages,” his performance was accompanied with an abstract video by Isabela Dos Santos.

Similar convergences surfaced throughout the set, which introduced Sriracha, a flexible ensemble Mr. Tao patterned partly after Bang on a Can. In Mr. Tao’s “leaves,” the tap dancer Caleb Teicher lent pattering footwork to a genial mix of classical rigor and electro-pop hooks.

Two further sets during Unplay’s long opening night extended themes of digital ingenuity and stylistic fusion. Sideband, a laptop-computer ensemble spun off from the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, offered a paradoxically visceral, endlessly engaging program of inventive pieces by its members, including Jascha Narveson’s starkly choreographed “In Line” and Dan Trueman’s infectious “Clapping Machine Music Variations” — true to its name, a clever riff on Steve Reich’s primal “Clapping Music.”

Todd Reynolds, a restlessly inquisitive violinist and composer, held the hardiest members of a thinned audience rapt with “Beginner’s Mind,” a slowly mounting soliloquy with electronic accompaniment, paired with R. Luke DuBois’s ingenious digital-art projections.

The set ended with “The Complexity of a Chair,” composed by Mr. Reynolds for the violinist Cornelius Dufallo, who joined him here. Though they met just recently, they share some history: each served a seven-year stint in the string quartet Ethel and pursued solo work thereafter. Small wonder that they should sound so compatible.